In my brilliance, I “adopted” two hungry orphans. When I’m not with them, I avoid every human being I can, trying to keep the kids safe and protected. It’s pretty easy to do because half the country lives in abject poverty.

A week ago, I treated myself to a cup of coffee, and ran into a mysterious boy with intense gray eyes. After a security drone worth billions blew up above my head, he chased me down to simply tell me that “change was coming.”

“What?”

When I got back to the homeless shelter, where I live, guess what was on TV? Me and the gray-eyed idiot who happened to have half his face covered. Unfortunately, I wasn’t so lucky.

Oh, but there’s more! The government, which shoots first and asks questions later, not only think that I’m a part of a rebel organization that they’ve been trying to eradicate for the last seven years, they actually believe that I’m the leader.

I could stop there with joy, but unfortunately the government kidnapped the two orphans—my two orphans. That’s when they really started to tick…me…off.

This dystopian novel is set in Atlanta sometime in the future. How convenient that I happened to be in Atlanta visiting family, when I started reading it! So as far as dystopian stories go, this one wasn’t terrible. I was glad that it wasn’t as long as Divergent, but it was still long enough that I understood what was going on.

Alright, so first off let’s talk about the characters. Paeton for the most part is a believable character, she has her quirks, and out of all of the characters is the most flushed out. You can easily see her strengths and weaknesses, and you know what drives her every day.

“Yeah. You’re special, Paeton.”

Why does every lead character have to be the “special” one? Why can’t they just be normal and be thrust into situations out of their control and somehow over come them? Anyway, most of the other characters were a little more one dimensional than Paeton. It was more of what you see is what you get and very little growth from that.

Plot: The plot was very similar to a lot of books that are already out there. The population is split into three different categories; Upper-C, Middle-C, and Lower-C. (I believe you can guess which category our main character is in.) Paeton gets dragged into the rebellion because she is caught on camera with one of the rebels, and she just happened to be the only one without a face mask on. So what does the government do? Label her as the leader of the “terrorist” group. When does a 16-year-old, who has to steal to survive, have time to plan and organize a terrorist group? This is probably one of my main problems with reading YA sometimes, but I can’t seem to stop myself from reading these type of books! It is one of my guilty pleasures in life.

“I looked at the star. All my life the flag meant very little to me, but in that moment I tried to search deeper, to see the hope the American flag once symbolized. I wondered, when did it become popular for Americans to only care about themselves? When did the powerful begin to loath the weak? When did humanity begin to die?”

Romance: I was glad that the romance wasn’t one of those insta-love type of situations, or a love triangle. Rylan, or Gray-Eyed Fox as Paeton refers to him in the beginning, is one of the characters that I wished had more growth. As the love interest in the story, I wish he had more of a voice rather than dropping everything and doing Paeton’s bidding. Other than that, I liked that he taught Paeton how to live like a teenager again instead of the way of life she was used to. I thought they were really cute together, even though it’s totally cliche, I liked that he kept saving her no matter how many times she pushed him away.

“I recognized I just had to live long enough to try for my first kiss again”

Like this:

Related

I am currently working on my master's degree in Environmental Science. I am an avid reader as well as a movie enthusiast! I currently live at the bottom of Texas with my husband and three dogs.
View All Posts